The Internet, like any other medium, has two principal means by which material can be judged. First, there is democratic judgment, where the public, without reference to individual background, experience, or education, judge the material by voting or rating or commenting on the basis of individual taste or whatever individual criteria they wish to apply. Second, there is quality judgment, where critics or specialists are selected or self-selected for their supposed talent experience or expertise in judging the material by rating and/or commenting on the basis of some critical notion of quality.
The Internet may be considered ideally suited to implement and express democratic judgments. In many systems, those systems simply count the visitors and present the cumulative and/or individual judgments of users. However, such systems only provide one form of judgment, namely a popular vote which expresses the taste (or agglomeration of individual criteria) of those voting. The Internet is not well-suited to implement and express quality judgments, which is the customary method for journals and specialist magazines with regard to movies or music or books where critical notions are applied to provide a qualitative assessment. The issue with bringing this type of process to the Internet is twofold: first, there sometimes is little agreement about the appropriate critical notions of quality which are to be applied; and second, there are not enough critics or specialists to deal with the quantity of material being deposited on the Internet.